Well, Brooke and Doreen we agree on one thing. The President makes great speeches. Have you factored into your "Obama climate change inaction fraction" that maybe Saudi Arabia has a tiny bit of influence on the Pres? Obama is pretty tight with the world's oil producing nations.

.

On another note, have you two been following the developments of the "Climate Conference" in Denmark? What a complete fiasco......

"We are here too, as part of a 13-student delegation from the College of the Atlantic on Mount Desert Island"

Nice carbon footprint hypocrites.

Sorry folks, but with each passing day, Americans become more aware that man is not the cause of this latest normal change in the climate cycle. You are wasting your time and ours.

Leadership?

What is that? Obama does what Wall Street and the banks tell him to do.

gov baldaci does what First Wind tells him to do.

Wish we had some leadership. The great ship of state is sinking.

COA is one strange place alright, better named Indoctrination U.

The climate hustlers are getting help from their pals in the media to downplay the U of East Anglia email revealtions, but the jig is up. There is no reason why we should trust "scientists" with such an agenda.

Leadership and Money can reverse climate change. Hope and Change can reverse economic disaster. Both of which we have discovered are lies and distortions. Man it's cold today... supposed to be colder tomorrow.

All I want for Christmas is a tropical get-away in Maine 2012, I'll have palm trees swaying in my backyard, and the ocean lapping at my toes... Sounds good to me!

Merry Christmas!

Wow - do you people even know what COA is - or that they're admired around the world? They're pretty amazing, and their alumni often go on to prestigious graduate schools, and some fascinating careers. But most of you sound like Flat-Earthers, so you probably don't appreciate COA alumni like Chellie Pingree. Keep your eyes open - those "indoctrinated" kids are the next world leaders. They're surely smarter than you.

Yes, I DO know what COA is and I also know who they're admired around the world BY....other lefty whackjobs. Name one private employer (excluding Geddy's Pub) that looks to COA grads to make his business go. If the best you can come up with is Chellie Pingree, I rest my case!!!

Hey TurkeyTalker~~Your Stuff Is Rhyming more and more everyday. Wow<<

Wow, I'm glad people at COA are trying to make some positive change in the world, because clearly no one else reading the Bangor Daily News is...

Actually, I don't think any COA alumni work at Geddy's Pub at all, so I'm not sure what you're getting at, there. However, in Bar Harbor alone, COA alumni own, operate or generally "make business go" at Reel Pizza, the Criterion, Havana, 2 Cats, Cafe This Way, Rupenuni's, Guiness & Porcelli's, Miguels, the Lompoc, Gringos, Morning Glory, Cadillac Mountain Sports, and the list goes on. So I'd say their local economy would be sorely the worse for wear without COA and their graduates! Also, MDI's local representative is Elsie Flemings, a COA graduate, who won by a landslide!

If sea levels rise as dramatically as this article speculates, it will cover the COA and we won't have to listen to this pathetic twaddle any more. My college prof used to lampoon this place whenever the opportunity arose and there was always plenty of material. The weed those trust fund babies smoke has caused a hole in the ozone over MDI.

Wow. Ignorance this overwhelming isn't possible to correct. Hope you're enlightened someday!

She is too uptight to be smoking weed.

jsh, please enlighten us with your PHD in Science

yes,jsh, we are prepared to be enligtened......

jsh105, I chose Geddy's as an example because it's familiar to most Bangor residents and I've seen COA students working in there, but your much longer list of similar establishments is even more convincing. Very frequently, a COA degree gets you a government job, a job funded by a government grant, or a job in a restaurant/bar or manning the cash register at a retail store. That's NOT exactly what most real institutes of higher learning aspire to. The world only needs just so many whale counters. ;-)

I find it just a little bit absurd that this young student and professor who wrote the original letter feel they are qualified to tell us all about the evils of global climate change, despite the students youth and inexperience, their lack of scientific knowledge (professor of global environmental politics, NOT science), and in view of the fact that their presence in Copenhagen means they definitely don't practice what they advocate for the rest of us (unless they all rowed or sailed across the Atlantic).

I also get a kick out of people announcing that those who disagree with them are "unenlightened." LOL I can't even imagine the chutzpah it takes to say something like that, but liberals do it every day and even manage to keep a straight face. Amazing!

Attacking people instead of rationally arguing point by point on the basis of ideas generally indicates a poor argument. If you are honest, you will read this and consider your arguments again before posting. If you consider this to be egghead nonsense, then you've chosen ignorance and only a fool argues with a fool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

In terms of the editorial itself, and I'd say American politics in general (the system I'm most familiar with), I'd say that we've been brainwashed to think it is the president who has all the power and leadership to change big things (e.g. healthcare, taxes, climate change, economy, jobs, etc). This is in fact a myth. The president cannot write or create laws. Congress does that. The president can only veto a law, and even then the congress can override it.

So why is it we're told over and over that it's "Obama's failure" and "Obama's success" and "Obama's plan" and "Obama's leadership"?

He may have some margin of influence, but it is CONGRESS that makes the laws. Why do we need a myth around one person who DOESN'T EVEN HAVE THE POWER THAT'S ATTRIBUTED TO HIM? Because it's easier to think about? Easier to tell a sexy story and sell cars during the six o'clock news? What is up with that?

If this doesn't show up as a link here, please copy and paste it into a browser window and read it. It's a wikipedia article that explains what an Ad Hominem attack is.

COPY AND PASTE THIS AND GO TO THE PAGE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

I would argue that the people with their hands on the real levers of power in our country love to see "the people" divided and disregarding each other with Ad Hominem arguments. Elections themselves are a form of training and education about what is "okay" in social discourse. As long as we're calling each other names as though we're on a fifth grade playground, the bankers, insurance companies, private investment firms, etc etc get away with ripping us off blind. THEY know the real power is in congress. WE're left out here listening to meaningless misdirection, myth-making and name-calling.

And finally, I would say that without ideals, however imperfect they may be in their execution, we are lost. Without laws based on reason, fairness, and common sense, the world itself is lost. To say that someone's efforts are invalid because they are not perfect is ignorant, no matter what side of the political fence you may identify with or claim as your own. Every day big business is working congress against us while we shut our eyes and make believe that the president is in charge of everything and responsible for everything. We are being systematically infantilized. Left or right, knee-jerk reactions perpetuating thoughtless name calling is exactly what big power wants. It keep us busy while they pick our pockets. It keeps us separated and fighting over scraps they leave behind.

That is NOT what the founding fathers intended. Far from it. We the people are being divided and conquered. We are being encouraged to mindlessly and passionately choose one side or the other of fallacious arguments, misdirected at every turn. The economy, even the very country, is being used as a tool to empower the few, in no small part through the manipulation of Congress, and the media tell us it's one man in the Whitehouse who makes all decisions and bears all responsibility for the whole thing. He doesn't. No president ever will, but there's a big payoff for a select few if the majority of the country believes.

Things going good? The president did it! Things going badly? The president did it!

I just don't buy it.

downeastjim, lots of "this's" in your post so a bit tough to discern just what you mean. I really don't need to look up the definition of "ad hominem." It's something liberals always bring up to avoid presenting any real evidence of their own when they aren't calling GWB nasty names and referring to others as "neocons" and "Flat Earthers" and "troglodytes" and "ignorant," etc.

Part of the discussion here has been about the qualifications of these people to be having a "delegation" to the climate change conference and to tell us that catastrophe awaits us here in Maine if we don't act quickly. It's impossible to address the absurd, hysterical, claims they make without pointing out the obvious, just like many so called IPCC "scientists," these people have NO qualifications that indicate they have even begun to seriously study the SCIENCE of climate change. Instead, they are experts on the POLITICS of the issue and that's where they are coming from and that is fairly representative of COA as a whole, at least compared to other more traditional universities and colleges. I happen to think that this is exactly what is wrong with this whole discussion, there are WAY too many impassioned young people and WAY too many political types speaking out much too loudly, and WAY too few boring scientists, methodically conducting research with open minds and no political motive.

Not too sure what "this" in your "egghead" remark was in reference to. But no, I don't think the definition of ad hominem is particularly egg headed. Neither do I think that climate change hysterics is egg headed, instead, it's mostly politically motivated hysteria about something we know little about, with almost no regard to the devastating negative effects of passing new rules that have been proposed.

BTW, I did post a rather long discussion earlier this morning that focused much more on some of the negative effects of what these terribly misguided people are trying to do, rather on the lack of qualifications of the people themselves, but somehow that post seems to have completely disappeared. Imagine that. Also, I seem to have missed your post that point by point discussed WHY you think this climate change hysteria is something we should legitimately fear. But I CAN find where you suggest that anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint is a fool. Does that ad hominem accusation thing cut both ways, or is it just reserved for those you disagree with? COPY AND PASTE THIS AND GO TO THE PAGE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

Global Warming - The Hoax that will take America down. Of course, that's all in the Obama play book. Wake up and smell the corruptioin and greed. I can remember the day when we Americans were better educated and could not be so easily fooled. I guess those days are dead and gone.

Well, maybe I didn't make the point plainly enough, but I did say we as Americans (on all sides) tend to use Ad Hominem arguments instead of discussing ideas. It's a function of convenience, I think, on the one hand, and it's "just what we do" on the other. "Deal with it."

The science on climate change is already proven. Political action is exactly what's needed. Just "what" political action should be taken will be decided in the usual, completely chaotic, messy, uncertain, imperfect way in which most things change. Almost completely out of our individual control yet somehow created by all of us together. In some ways there is no absolute center of power. There are a multitude of simultaneous conflicts on all levels, playing out all the time at once. There are points of recognition that things have changed throughout history, but we can't always point to the exact decisions or actions that caused them. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can't.

Of course Copenhagen is about politics. What else would it be about?

My point about the overstatement and mythology of an American president's power, and the general blind eye turned to where the real power plays out in America (and in other similar and different ways internationally) WAS my attempt to address the original article on it's factual arguments. The original article talks a lot about the president. How do you feel about that point specifically? (see point about president in my previous post). I'm curious to hear what you think about that.

Other than that, I would add that the dispassionate, politically indifferent scientist is also a myth in my experience. Science is as affected by money and politics as Congress, and ALWAYS has been.

I share your skepticism of political action generally, though. I see American politics as a bipolar whole. Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, we are one nation, and we have a footprint and affect on the world as a whole. I don't blame liberals or conservatives. I blame them both as one thing, one organization. We're all responsible for it, good and ill. On all sides. My side. Your side. Our side. Their side. All sides.

Can climate change and politics be measured in finite gradations and with absolute certitude? I don't believe they can. Is there such a thing as an apolitical, dispassionate expert?

I haven't heard, seen, or met a single one in 50 years.

Does that mean that everything they say is meaningless? Or that you or I say? Or that anyone says?

In politics, we seem to argue over perfect truth as if it existed, and hold each other to that standard while we can't know it ourselves. I believe we all do, and probably always will. We attack single sentences as though they held the soul of another human being's purpose, effectiveness, and value. We use logic to negate, marginalize, discredit and discourage each other.

Why do you think we do that? I often hear people say it has to do with what they "believe". But where do these beliefs come from? What are they made of? I'm not being semantic here. I really want to know what kind of logic and reason leads us to diminish each other in the ways we do. Who benefits? Where does it get us? What does it accomplish?

I'd say the editorial had an effect. We spent some amount of time thinking about climate change. The professor and her students can count that as an accomplishment. We thought about it today. Strangers interacted publicly. I think that's what democracy's about. I guess it's also about yelling names at each other. lol.

Let's just hope we find other ways to work together. Imperfect. Uncertain. With courage and fortitude.

The science on climate change is not settled, Jim - if it was, we wouldn't have all this controversy.

When you say the science on climate change is already proven, that's akin to you getting in a discussion with earplugs in your ears, that's fine for a monologue but not so good for an honest discussion of a complex issue. You're announcing right away that your mind is closed and you aren't interested in a real discussion. Gore has tried that "the science is settled" approach too and it's blown up in his face because so much of what he said has been proven to be untrue and even deliberately misleading. There are a great many real scientists with advanced degrees who either have other explanations for it, or say they just can't be sure yet. But you and Al Gore and a bunch of politically minded people in Copenhagen just KNOW the science is settled and are willing to spend billions that we don't have to "fix" what we don't even know to be a problem, or a problem that's fixable using the approach you have in mind.

The science on climate change has NOT been proven. The door of debate has been closed by the global warmist alarmists because they know they cannot win in an open debate when the true facts come out.

I meant to say agreed upon, not proven. I apologize for misspeaking. No response to the other points?

I'm sitting here in Maine freezing my ass off as a typical Maine winter settles in and the BDN gives this kind of space to a bunch of young kids who have far more zealotry than common sense? Give me a break about climate change! 12 degrees with a wind chill of below zero seems pretty common in Maine in December. Don't let these starry-eyed idealistic twits lead us down their "green" path. I don't give a damn about the other countries. We shouldn't destroy our economy over bogus science. Their panacea would have Maine look like a pincushion with thousands of unreliable, poorly producing wind turbines to solve some energy problem that can't even be agreed upon. The only thing I want is stable, reasonable, and reliable energy mix. The day a forest of turbines replaces Maine's special places will be a sad day indeed, but that's just what these kids want in order to meet their concept of "saving the planet".

downeastjim, There's a world of difference in "proven" and "agreed upon!" Agreed upon by whom? You don't make plans to spend billions (political action) to address a supposed problem just because a bunch of non-scientists "agree" that the problem exists and how to fix it. The logical thing to do is to wait until the scientists have studied it enough so there is widespread agreement among them just like every scientific issue is eventually settled. You seem like a thoughtful person, yet you blithely jump onboard this crazy idea to spend billions, with no apparent regard for the economic impact (that's real hardship) on milliions all around the world. I know it's the trendy thing to do these days, but it boggles my mind that more people aren't questioning it and discussing both the pro's AND con's of taking action against climate change before scientists agree what is happening and what must be done, if anything, to influence it.

As far as the Presidents real power versus his perceived power, I tend to agree with you that it tends to be greatly exaggerated by the press and frequently by those running for that office. How many times have we heard that a President or other politician will bring jobs as a reason to vote for him/her? I always want to ask, "where are you going to get jobs to give out to these people you're making promises to?" The fact is a politician can directly provide jobs only by taking money from people who already are working hard at their jobs (reducing their standard of living) and funneling it through a bunch of bureaucrats, each of them taking a piece for themselves, and taking the remainder to pay yet another government employee. Ironically, he can best help provide REAL jobs by doing the exact opposite of what pols usually do, and that is to get government out of the way so that both established businesses and entrepreneurs can see their way to making additional profits by growing their business and adding employees. The problem we have in Maine, and nationwide is that we have way too many pols who are trying to provide jobs to their constituents the first way, and that means they are stifling business and reducing the standard living of people who already have jobs in order to hire more government employees. This works great for the pol because the new government employee is grateful and the pol essentially gets credit for giving away something that didn't belong to him in the first place. On the other hand, if he merely keeps government out of the way so business can prosper, even though his constituents are much better off, he isn't perceived as having given out anything so his power doesn't grow. That's pretty much how I see the success of the Democratic party, promising to give away things they don't have to people who are envious of their neighbors success. Once the voters are willing to accept this cycle of giving the government more and more of their discretionary income, and depend more and more on the government to provide for their welfare, it's a very slippery slope to the bottom, and that's where I see us as headed right now.

It sounds like Mr. Obama is losing some of his lustre with the rest of the world.

Does anyone else see the sad irony and sense the frustration these poor Copenhagen delegates must be feeling returning to America during the worst blizzard of the century?